The semiconductor device, especially the silicon device has been progressed in the large scale integration and the low power consumption through applying the miniaturization (scaling rule: Moore's rule), and has been developed in a pace of four times progress every three years. It is required to improve device performance through applying an approach different from the conventional scaling rule, because the gate length of MOSFET (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) nowadays has become shorter than 20 nm, a cost of the lithography process rises suddenly, and there exists physical limit to the device size. The steep rise in the cost of the lithography process is, for example, a steep rise in the prices of an apparatus and a mask set. The physical limit to the device size is, for example, a limit to the operation and a limit due to the manufacturing deviation.
In order to improve the limit, in recent years, a programmable logic device which is rewritable and is called FPGA has been developed as an intermediate device between the gate array and the standard cell. FPGA makes it possible that, after a chip is manufactured, a customer configures a circuit through carrying out an electrical wiring on the chip arbitrarily. It is expected that the power consumption may be further lowered through using a variable resistance element inside a multi-layered wiring layer of FPGA. As the variable resistance element, there are ReRAM (Resistance Random Access Memory) using the transition metal oxide, NanoBridge (registered trademark by NEC Corporation) using the ion conductor and the like. Patent literature 1 and non-patent literature 1 disclose a variable resistance element using the mobility of the metal ion and the electrochemical reaction in the solid in which the metal ion can move freely by applying an electric field or the like. The solid, in which the ion can move freely by applying the electric field, is an ion conductor. The variable resistance element, which is disclosed in the patent literature 1 and the non-patent literature 1, includes an ion conducting layer, and a first electrode and a second electrode which are disposed on the opposite surfaces contacting with the ion conducting layer. The metal ion is supplied from the first electrode to the ion conducting layer, and the metal ion is not supplied from the second electrode. According to the variable resistance element which is disclosed in the patent literature 1 and the non-patent literature 1, a value of the electrical resistance is made to vary through changing polarity of an applied voltage and a state of conduction between two electrodes are controlled. Moreover, the patent literature 1 and the non-patent literature 1 disclose a crossbar switch which uses the variable resistance element in ULSI (Ultra-Large Scale Integration).